Dear Clueless About Marketing Programmer: Yes it’s hard, but not impossible.

http://www.chrisle.me/2013/11/dear-clueless-about-marketing-programmer-yes-its-hard-but-not-impossible/

by iamchrisle • 13 years ago

61 22 13 years ago

zzzaim• 13 years ago

As another developer preparing to "launch" a product, this is rather encouraging.

Would be nice if you could share what suggestions you gave Basil regarding his site (with his permission). Might be enlightening to many, even if it's only relevant to his product.

iamchrisle4• 13 years ago

I'll let him blog in detail about it but one suggestion I made was that a single page website could be harder to get visibility on just simply in terms of Google search. At least in terms of the people he believe to be his direct competition.

If he's looking to attract specific types of developers he should consider create pages targeted to those developers. So those pages would get indexed for the specific developers who are searching for a jira/github/fogbugz tracking app.

collyw• 13 years ago

Marketing is harder than programming?

To a programmer yes.

If programmers and marketers were to swap jobs, my guess is that programers would get closer to achieving the marketers job than the other way around.

dl_terp• 13 years ago

I agree with this. I am a business guy with a marketing background. I can tell you what needs to be done with marketing and probably fill your "knowledge coffer" in about 5 days.

Programming is the truly hard part, it takes months to get a handle on and as soon as you put it down for a few weeks you must re-learn much of what you've forgotten (at least that's my experience).

If marketing was harder than programming, I think we'd have dozens of programmers trying to find marketers on Craigslist and forums... instead of reality which is marketers scraping for programmers to join projects on an equity basis.

amirmc• 13 years ago

If marketing was harder than programming, I think we'd have dozens of programmers trying to find marketers on Craigslist and forums... instead of reality which is marketers scraping for programmers to join projects on an equity basis.

That sounds true on the surface but actually we've no idea of the number of programmers who failed but would/could have succeeded had they gone looking for a marketer. That marketers go out and try to 'market themselves' to programmers shouldn't be a surprise.

maroonblazer• 13 years ago

While I agree that in terms of skill-set marketing is probably easier to pick up than programming (I make a living as a marketer and programming is a hobby), there are organizational factors in a marketing department (large ones anyway) that don't exist in an engineering dept. Namely, a multitude of stakeholders who all need or want a say in how the product is marketed. This is compounded by the fact that marketing effectiveness can be harder to measure - MUCH harder if you don't control the sales channel - and so a lot of subjectivity comes into play.

Where I work, on a consumer electronics product, there are up to a dozen different departments and no less than 27 people who weigh in on what I do. Compared to programming, where the ultimate arbiter could simply be "Does it work?" or "Do the tests pass?" marketing is a tangle of opinion and politics.

roymurdock• 13 years ago

It's hard to compare which is more difficult.

Marketing is more of a soft skill - it takes relatively more creativity and a better understanding of human nature than programming languages. This isn't to say programming isn't a creative pursuit; it's just creativity bounded by logical constraints imposed by whatever language you're working in.

Programming is more of a hard skill - it takes years of studying and practicing the different languages and mastering the logical thought processes that make things tick.

So difficulty depends on what your natural talents are. If you're an intelligent, logical individual you might find coding easier. If you're an intelligent, creative individual you might find marketing easier.

I think the prevalence of UX/UI design has evolved from a need to have both spheres in order to build the best projects possible. It combines the human aspects of customer experience with the mechanical aspects of making shit work. Apple got it right and look where they are now.

melindajb2• 13 years ago

This: it all depends on who YOU are. I've met many a coder who cannot even conceive of how to promote the product, but will rip out an idea provided by someone else that we think is impossible; in a couple of hours in the middle of the night; with a twist that makes it insanely great. They marvel at the idea; the rest of us marvel at their technical skill. No one is "better" or "more intelligent." We're all just part of the team, each bringing our gifts to bear.

ebbv• 13 years ago

As a developer who is heavily involved in our marketing department; I really don't think it's hard at all.

Marketing is about a few things:

- Who is your customer?

- Why should they buy your product?

- Find them and tell them.

The problem with marketing is it can get really expensive really fast and if you're limited in capital then that becomes a problem.

But it couldn't be simpler. There's no complicated problems to solve like with programming. It's a single task; find your target audience and tell them about what you have to offer.

If you don't have convincing reasons why people should buy your product, then that's a product problem, not a marketing one.

Also, marketers DO have a tools. If you think they don't that's probably one reason why marketing is so hard for you. All of your advertising should be using tracking which lets you see conversion rates, average income per click, income per view, etc. and help you make future advertising decisions.

EDIT:

I should clarify that I think Marketing can be/should be a full time job and if you can afford it, it's good to have a person (or team) dedicated to it. But I don't think it requires the same kind of problem solving that programming does.

iamchrisle4• 13 years ago

Perhaps I'll nuance: Conceptually, marketing is not hard. But it's very hard work.

austinhutch• 13 years ago

If you don't have convincing reasons why people should buy your product, then that's a product problem, not a marketing one.

"Marketing" is an ambiguous term in comparison to "programming". I believe finding product-market fit is a marketing problem.

iamben• 13 years ago

+100 karma points for contacting the author of the original post and helping him out - and then writing this. We need plenty more people like you around here :-)

iamchrisle4• 13 years ago

thanks.

austenallred2• 13 years ago

The most difficult part of being a marketer is finding out what actually works. There is all sorts of advice out there from people that give you tips and recommendations, and 99% of them have no idea what they're talking about. In that way it can be a lot like programming; you can either pay some kid $10/hour to slog it out and figure it out as he goes, or you can pay a premium for someone who can say, "oh yeah you do this and this and this," and he's done.

It's a lot easier to pretend to be a marketer than it is to pretend to be a programmer, because you can sell something that doesn't work all day and people will still unknowingly buy it. Some people, I fear, discount what great marketers can do because they never actually learn the difference.

One of the reasons marketing and finding a good marketer is hard, is because you don't know why (or if) it's not working. Imagine if every time you coded something up you never actually got to run a program and see what the results were. Marketing can feel the same way; you build something, and it is probably failing somewhere, but until you finally put it together right you don't really know where. Are you advertising or marketing in the wrong places? Does your landing page suck? Maybe your product actually sucks and no one cares? You just have to test and test and test to try to create some semblance of data.

Then when you do actually do it people say, "Oh, that's it? That wasn't hard." Like when a great designer creates a very simple logo that communicates the essence of the brand in a beautiful way, and someone says, "Well that only took you five minutes." It's not about the five minutes it took me to create that; it's about the years of work I put in to learn how to create that. It takes a hell of a lot of work to get to simple.

I had some serious cognitive dissonance when I started giving out some of my hacks in "The hacker's guide to user acquisition" (first chapter - http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1...), the only reason I'm spilling some of my hard-earned secrets is because I see too many good products die because whoever built it never got it out to the right people.

I'm not sure how programmers can differentiate between a marketer that knows what they're talking about and one that doesn't; that's as difficult as a marketer discerning who is a gifted programmer and who isn't.

So, knowing what actually works is hard. Is marketing harder than programming? Not for me, it took me a week to figure out how to get my first rails server live and on Github. But just like any other field, there is a long, long learning curve if you're going to do it well.

iamchrisle4• 13 years ago

A couple statements to highlight:

"because I see too many good products die because whoever built it never got it out to the right people."

- yes. Great ideas DESERVE to be found!

"difficult as a marketer discerning who is a gifted programmer and who isn't"

The street goes both ways. I would say that it's easy to fool a marketer into thinking you're a rockstar programmer.

"there is a long, long learning curve if you're going to do it well."

Well said. I still personally think it's more difficult -- maybe not conceptually, but it's terribly labor intensive and unpredictable.

grinnick• 13 years ago

Dude. When's the next chapter coming? I've been waiting for like a month now!? :-)

austenallred2• 13 years ago

It's about halfway done; should be out by this weekend crosses fingers. It's about getting press, and man there's going to be some cool stuff in it.

melindajb2• 13 years ago

So much truth here, thank you for sharing it. As a marketer inside technical companies, daily scrums are hard for me, as are hackathons, because what marketers do is execute, a little every day. Day after day it looks like you do tiny things, and that's exactly what it is. Testing, measuring, iterating. lather, rinse, repeat. For a lifetime. And that, as you referred to in your design analogy, doesn't count the endless hours of getting inside your customers' heads, qualitatively and quantitatively. Like leadership, it's part science, and part art. Very hard for purely quantitative people to grok.

danmaz74• 13 years ago

As one more hacker who works in marketing, my suggestion is to start as soon as possible to spend some time building relationships with the influencers you'll want to talk about your launch and then your new releases etc.

Unless you're funded by some well-connected VC, you're going to need those relationships.

lukethomas• 13 years ago

As someone who does marketing and writes code, I've seen that programmers think there's secrets to marketing that they don't know (hence the programmer who says he "is clueless about marketing")

The reality is that a marketer who seems to have everything together is putting on a great show. Marketing broken down into its simplest form is just running tests, measuring them, and finding out what works and what doesn't.

Each business is different, and marketers deal with irrational humans instead of computers. If you're a marketer and think you know everything, it's a bad combination.

nawitus• 13 years ago

In some ways marketing is harder than programming. Writing a program, you can see your errors and find the root problem with stack traces.

That doesn't make programming easier, because expections are way higher for programming. Code correctness is orders of magnitudes higher than "marketing correctness". Marketing models are extremely fuzzy when compared to the average software.

In other words, if someone did invent a "stack trace for marketing", then the expected level of correctness for marketing would increase by a huge amount.

Goopplesoft• 13 years ago

I made a ask HN similar to this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6692952

It really is difficult especially because everyone wants to found their idea, so its especially hard to find a good marketer to pair with you if youre a good programmer. Otherwise no matter how good you are at it to some extent your using your time inefficiently since a marketer will be better. For the relationship to be truly successful you have to both be driven and care about the product and in most cases that wont happen unless the idea is joint.

Dear Clueless About Marketing Programmer: Yes it’s hard, but not impossible.

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